The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Mallam rumbled, “Lami Tenguft suggests a solution to affairs of these parts.”

  Morgin commented politely, “It is as you expound, Ringuid Goam Mallam. I shall say as much to Ruggou; it would appear to be to his advantage, indeed. And so the lands of the Aurismen will not change, nor those of the Lagostome. Upon what or whom will you hunt, may I ask?”

  Afanasy said, “The outcast, those who have done great wrong in their own lands; the outlaw bands, robbers and murderers; and of course those who come to hunt Haydar . . . what should they expect.”

  Morgin reflected and was content. Yes, just so were things resolved, usually. Be patient and an answer would come. The Haydar band would bring stability, a continuance of the state of things. And Ruggou would not be brought into contact with the realm of Molio Azendarach, which would have the effect of keeping Molio on his side of the river, and would save Sept Aurisman for a more temperate leader to succeed Ruggou, one with more pedestrian dreams. Yes. He said, “I see no impediment to your coming here.”

  Mallam nodded, smiled, flashing white teeth. “A-ha! That is good. So, then, here we are, all of us.” He signalled with one arm to the remainder of the band, and in response several dark shapes materialized, seemingly out of the very earth, out of shadows. Mallam called to them, “Talras, Segedine! Make the signs to free the beasts! We stay! Rhardous N’Hodos and Tesselade! To the south, for a fete, one Meor. One will be sufficient for us, for the stranger-Embasse is not of the blood!” He turned to Morgin. “I may proceed assuming you do not share our custom?”

  “Without offense. I hope I give none in turn.”

  “It is as you say . . . there are few like us in the wideness of the world. But will you rest a while? Lafma has his tamgar, for the song, and the Lami carries in her mind the visions of the people. She will sing of our great hunts, that our young men may on the morrow feel the wind and see far, and make the motions by the firelight that they may have before their spirits the image of the perfect woman of the people.”

  Morgin answered diplomatically, “When I spoke with Lami Tenguft Ouarde, I could see with all my senses that she was indeed a worthy vessel of your dreams. Would that I could see and hear it all, that I, an unworthy Embasse of unknown lineage, might glimpse that which your people know in full. But yet I have affairs of my own, as well, which call. I would speak with Ruggou, that his mind be correct in the way of things.”

  “Just so . . .” He was interrupted. One of the Haydars who had remained behind now approached, quickly, and spoke to Mallam. The hoarse whispers said, “My S’fou Mallam: I made the signs in their proper order, but they who fly do not depart. They continue to circle, and have been joined by wild ’Natzers as well!”

  Mallam responded, “Into hunt-dispersal, then! Call in the hunt! Embasse! What of the Prote?”

  Tenguft, having heard, had been craning her head back, hood falling off and back, looking at the sky and the stars. Morgin looked at the girl, then at the sky. He saw nothing, but a suggestion of motion nagged at the edge of perception. Something was up there, that was sure. Tenguft said, “When they circle and are joined by the wild, there will be blood. There are almost fifty ’Natzers now waiting.”

  Morgin turned to Seuthe-the-Bagman, but it was not necessary, for now the Prote of Morgin the Embasse had chosen to speak. The voice of the Prote was strained, full of wavers, and hesitations. It said, “The reading is complete, near and far. Danger! Encystment has commenced. Do not move, especially to the north or east. A star is falling, and one may not run from it. Impact by the breaks, east. Something burning, from the other side of the world, from deep in the night, from far away, around the horizon. There is energy! Something is interfering with placeread!”

  Morgin started. “A falling star? Here?”

  The Prote continued for a little, its voice now much weakened, “Not stone, One-Organ. Something that slows, that moves against the stream, that moves of itself. I fear.” At the end, the voice was highly distorted. The Prote spoke no more.

  Morgin said to Afanasy, “And yours?”

  “Encysted already.”

  Morgin said, “That which moves against the stream is a ship! The true men are returning! The men return!”

  Tenguft retrieved her spear. “Or the warriors, may they eat grass, such as shall lead them to.” She lifted the blade to her lips, kissed it quickly, thrust the long spear upward against the night sky of the east. She repeated fervently, “Let the Warriors return and meet their creations!”

  Morgin turned with the rest and looked now to the east: at first, they saw nothing—there was the night and the darkness; the lights of the Delta could not be seen from the plains of Ombur, where they stood. And down from the starry zenith, the near stars shone clearly, without flickering, but near the horizon, close to the planet, through the dense atmosphere, they winked and trembled as if ripples were passing before them. They marked out the familiar constellations of the proper season: The Reaper, The Crown, The Netsman flinging his sparkling cluster into the South. Close to the horizon, they seemed to go on and off, some winking out for moments at a time. But there was another star there, in the East, that did not go out, red-orange and burning in the night, rising from the east, a baleful star that neither wavered nor flickered out of sight. It cleared the horizon and vaulted into the sky, growing as they watched.

  4

  “I once examined the horoscopes of a number of murderers in order to find out what planetary dispositions were responsible for the temperament. To my amazement, it was not the secret and explosive energy of Uranus, not the sinister and malignant selfishness of Saturn, not the ungoverned fury of Mars, which formed the background for the crime, but the callous intellectual ism of Mercury. Then comes a most extraordinary discovery. The horoscopes of the murdered are almost identical with those of the assassins. They asked for it!”

  —A. C.

  FOR A LONG time, in the warm darkness of the compartment, they did not say anything; no words seemed necessary. But after an unmeasured time, Meure could no longer contain some of that which was in him, and he said, simply, “There are words that I wanted to say before, then, now, for I came to remember.”

  It was quiet again for another time, marked only by breathing, by heartbeats, by a small, rare rustling of the coverlet. But in the end, Audiart spoke also; she said, as simply, “And I came to forget.” And then, “To cast away, be rid of, be unencumbered of . . . but I see that even as I wipe away that which has passed, the marks of my wiping make a new record, and nothing will come of what I wished but more change.”

  “I am changed.”

  “And I, by no less.” But she rolled away from him and curled her body a little, as if she wished to sleep now.

  Meure remained still, listening, waiting, remembering. He let his senses return him to his surroundings, to collect the feel of the ship Ffstretsha. There was yet a dim light in the compartment, splayed along the ceiling, coming from the kitchen lights down in the space below. He remembered: he had intended to shut the compartment door, but that had been interrupted, and it was still open. His body was damp with sweat, and there was a warm, bare body next to his. And now he felt again the motions of the ship: rockings from side to side, damped, gentle, but reduced greatly from the true motion which must be outside. The ship moved on all three axes, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes by two axes, sometimes along one axis alone. The motions were random, unpredictable, now seemingly less severe, but broader in scope. The ship calmed, and almost became still, and then without anticipation began a surging motion ahead. To Meure, his inner ear system suggested a mushy acceleration ahead, as if pushed from behind, while the ship pitched upwards, nose-high; this was followed by an indescribable slewing, which rapidly altered into an angry shaking, a series of jerkings. He heard, from below, a hissing sound from the direction of the kitchen unit, and the lights went out. Not at once: they faded out. A red light illuminated in the ceiling of the compartment, and from a concealed speaker, a beepi
ng tone began, interrupted at regular intervals by the breathy lisping of a recorded Spsom announcement. The compartment door began sliding shut. Meure half-rose to reach to stop it, rising at last out of the passive waiting, suddenly realizing; he reached across Audiart, who was also trying to move, but he felt a prickling along his fingertips, a numbing. He reached closer, and there was a bright flash of energy discharge. He drew back, rubbing his fingers, against the back wall. Audiart pressed her body back from the doorway, now fully closed. From somewhere in the framework of the ship, several metallic sounds occurred, strongly suggesting the operation of a locking mechanism. They were locked in.

  They pressed close together; there was a sensation of pressure, of numbness in their limbs, and then there was no motion sensible at all, and in one more instant, nothing at all. There was no fading, no drifting, as in sleep, or unconsciousness. Time just ended. Meure had only time to start to say, “I th-STOP

  -ink it is some kind of protective field.” Time began again, the door snapped open, and from speakers all over the ship, a gong began tolling, punctuated by a Spsom voice enunciating at regular intervals, a single word that sounded like ‘Vv-h’t.’ The outer door of their shared quarters burst open to the noise of much confusion without, and at last the voice of Clellendol broke clear through it: “Up! Up! All out of the ship!”

  Meure and Audiart hurriedly retrieved their hastily-discarded clothing from the places where it had fallen and struggled to put it on, while below, in the compartment there was the sound of doors and cabinets opening and closing, and then quiet. Now they could hear the sounds of the ship.

  The sounds were not so much in the air, as in the very fabric of the ship itself; there were long, sustained groans, punctuated by ominous pops, cracks; in the background, the hissing of escaping gas could also be heard from time to time. They took no time to gather anything, but dodged through the kitchen into the common-room, where the lighting was still working, but was flickering. The ship settled to a new center of gravity with an easy, floating motion, which seemed to start up a new series of creaks and groans. They balanced carefully across the shifting compartment and attained the hallway, where the lights were definitely out.

  At the curving of the bulkhead, Clellendol waited for them, looking nervously about. “Come on, come on,” he fidgeted. “They are waiting for us at the port. We’re down successfully on Monsalvat, whatever luck that is, but Ffstretsha is breaking up and we must get out of it. That Vdhitz tried to explain it, but I couldn’t make sense of it.”

  The three of them hurried through the swaying central corridor to the entry port, where the remainder of the crew and passengers was awaiting them: three Lerfolk; Dreve Halander and the slender girl, Ingraine Deffy; two Spsom, Captain Shchifr and Vdhitz; and the single remaining slave, the diminutive furry creature from Vfzyekhr. Vdhitz was anxiously looking outside, half-hanging out the port. Without looking back, he made a motion with his free hand to the rest, and swung through the port onto the ground. Shchifr glanced quickly over the survivors, and gestured at the port. Then he stood aside to let them pass.

  Meure was at the end of the line and could see little enough of the view outside the ship; he had an impression that the ship was somewhat tilted over on its side, so that the port was looking downward, rather than directly out, as would be the normal case. There was a peculiar reddish light, but he could not imagine the source, and he asked Audiart, “What time is it?”

  She looked back over her shoulder, her face blank. “Time? It’s the middle of the night, of course! When else shipwreck? Come on! We’re here, that’s what!”

  Audiart reached the port behind Clellendol, grasped the edge-handles awkwardly, and swung through. And with Shchifr urging him from behind, Meure followed her onto the soil of Monsalvat.

  Meure felt dazed and disoriented. He wanted to stop where he was, in the now comforting shadow of the bulk of the Ffstretsha, under the tangle of the absurd Spsom conduit system, but Shchifr had now dropped out of the ship, and was hurriedly removing devices from his vest and tossing them back into the open port. Inside, all was dark. Here, there was a faint light, but the source was out of sight. There seemed to be vegetation underfoot, wiry and stringy, matted down by the ship when it had landed. He heard voices, sensed motion ahead, under the piping, and Clellendol’s voice urging him to run. He ran ahead, ducked under a sagging conduit, whose paint was burned entirely off, and whose broken end waved loosely about like some live thing, and at last saw the group ahead of him, running from the ship. Meure followed, trying to catch up; Shchifr easily ran past him with the half-bound, half-leaping motion of a Spsom running.

  Shchifr waved them on, and together they ran another distance, slightly uphill, not looking back. Meure sensed motions around them, in the air, along the ground, a great confusion somehow, but he could not stop to look.

  Finally they attained a rocky knoll, where they stopped. Meure found Audiart, sitting on the rocks, knees clasped closely to her chest, looking, staring back, in the direction of the ship. No. Past the ship. At the morning.

  He cast himself down beside her, looked back. In the east, the star of Monsalvat was rising into a new day. A double star called Bitirme.

  The star rising out of the eastern horizon was a close double, the two component stars being of apparently the same size, both of a rusty-orange color. They were separated by what appeared to be something a little more than a diameter, and their position seemed to change slightly with respect to one another as he watched. The sun (or was it suns, he thought) was filling the dawn sky with color, bringing the day out of night with an impossible indigo color, while clouds tinted in oranges and reds floated in impossibly clear air; around both stars was an envelope of pearly radiance which was fading with the daylight even as they watched.

  The ship lay partly on one side in a little hollow in what Meure saw to be rolling plains that fell away eastward; there were still lights showing in parts of it, but it also seemed to be settling into the ground, as if it no longer had some structural integrity necessary to conform its odd shape. Yes, that was it: it was relaxing, like some exotic, overripe fruit.

  And Meure looked upward and saw now the source of the motion he had sensed, perhaps. There were shapes in the morning light, darting, gliding, impossible shapes his mind at first refused to resolve; and from behind the ship people were running, running madly for the ship. People! Humans, judging by the shape of them in the distance, and their gait. They ran like people across the bristly, grasslike vegetation, which Meure now saw to have a distinct blue tint.

  The people surrounded the ship. Meure could see that most of them were smallish, slight of build, but most were carrying long knives, or short spears. They seemed to act like savages, capering and gesticulating madly, some rushing up to touch the ship, while others tried to wrench off a piece of dangling piping; it looked ridiculous, like ants attacking a ground-car. Meure felt a motion beside him, smelled a warm-cookie odor.

  Vdhitz said, half-whispering, “Semtheng neuw to sirprese dem volk den dere; Tshchiff’r set the Pile to iverlode biffor hee kem den. Blew soon, heh, heh, heh.”

  Audiart heard the Spsom and started forward to her knees, half to her feet. Meure grasped one arm, and from behind a rock, the Ler girl Flerdistar stepped in front of her. Flerdistar said quietly, “Do not oppose this; you will only die without changing the result. Spsom do not permit aliens to capture a disabled ship, and of a certainty not on Monsalvat; those will be Shchifr’s instructions, and he must carry them out. It is his last act as captain of a vessel, forever.”

  Audiart settled back, but she said, “Those are people down there.”

  The morning was now coming to light rapidly, the color coming up through various blues into a rosy color. And by the ship, the crowd had become large indeed; but some, at least, were suspicious, and urged the others to withdraw. Their prudence was soon rewarded when one end of the Spsom ship suddenly glowed, sagged, and began to melt, sinking to the ground.
The throng outside drew back, and Meure could hear their voices, calling angrily, hissing their displeasure. They left a respectful distance between themselves and the ship, but continued to watch attentively, milling about, brandishing their weapons at the ship.

  Flerdistar looked, and said, “There is no answer to that. We think those are people, but we do not know. This is Monsalvat, and the word has strange meanings here.” And she looked away from Audiart, and did not meet her returning gaze.

  Now some of the crowd about the ship were regaining their boldness, and were leaving their compatriots to make little forays to the ship, as if it were some live thing they could daunt with their boldness. Or perhaps they knew their gestures made no impression on the Ffstretsha, no longer a live thing to dance and flow in the currents of the oceans of space, and their demonstrations were for the benefit of their associates, more of whom seemed to be arriving every minute, so it appeared, from the east, from behind a low rise.

  Some became bolder, after some moments passed with no further events aboard the ship, although the melted end continued to glow redly with no visible change; one especially bold darted quickly to the entry port, hesitated, looked back once, and swung upward and inside. Another followed closely behind, not wanting to be thought less bold or resolute, but the second one did not enter. The crowd edged closer, throwing rocks at the ship.